Did Windows ever support any hardware architectures other than x86?
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Chapters
00:00 Did Windows Ever Support Any Hardware Architectures Other Than X86?
00:51 Accepted Answer Score 83
01:34 Answer 2 Score 47
03:23 Answer 3 Score 21
03:42 Answer 4 Score 14
04:23 Answer 5 Score 3
05:15 Thank you
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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/1062487/...
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Tags
#windows #privileges #x86 #mips
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 83
Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 as the first purely 32-bit version of Windows.
Windows NT was developed as a multi-architecture operating system. Initially supported different CPU architectures, including IA-32, DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC.
The original idea was to have a common code base with a custom Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for each platform. However, support for MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC was later dropped in Windows 2000.
ANSWER 2
Score 47
As far as I know there are 8 base-architectures (and a number of sub-variants) of which only 2 are still supported today with Windows 10.
Windows 1.0 to 3.11, Windows 95, 98 and Millenium Edition
x86 (16 bit and 32 bit variants, including 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, P4, Core, Core Duo, Core-I and various Celeron and Atom designs.) This also includes various compatible AMD and NEC CPU's.
Windows CE
MIPS, x86, ARM (thanks @pjc50).
(Not sure if CE ever ran on Alpha, PowerPC.)
Windows NT
x86, x64 (or amd64, both names are used), MIPS, Alpha, IA32, IA64, PowerPC.
Support for MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC was dropped in Windows 2000.
Itanium was server only starting with Windows 2000 and 32-bit (IA32) was dropped for 2008 and 64-bit (IA64) with Server 2012 if I recall correctly.
Only x86 (limited to some specialty netbook/tablet devices) and x64 are currently still valid for Windows 10.
Windows Phone
ARM, (maybe also MIPS ?)
Windows 10 for IoT
x64, ARM
ANSWER 3
Score 21
Windows XP 64bit and Windows Server 2003-2008R2 support the Intel Itanium IA-64 architecture.
ANSWER 4
Score 14
Windows Surface tablets released in 2012 used a 32-bit ARM architecture, this specific version was named Windows RT:
It is essentially an edition of Windows 8.x built for the 32-bit ARM architecture (ARMv7).
[…]
Due to the different architecture of ARM-based devices compared to x86 devices, Windows RT has software compatibility limitations.
Windows RT has been discontinued.
Source: Wikipedia.
ANSWER 5
Score 3
The windows NT line has supported various architectures over the years.
MIPS, and Alpha were supported from 3.1 to 4.0 (Alpha actually made it as far as a release candidate for Windows 2000, but it didn't make it to the final release). PowerPC was seen in 4.0 only.
IA64 (Itanium) was supported in Windows XP. It was also supported in the server line from Server 2003 to Server 2008 R2.
Microsoft has ported Windows to ARM but then artificially crippled the resulting systems in various ways. With windows RT (the ARM version of Windows 8) the system was pretty much complete, but third-party desktop apps were locked out. With the various ARM variants of Windows 10 the desktop seems to be gone completely.